Pages

Monday, 30 September 2013

On Sunday morning I was surprised to find a dead badger on a piece of
grass less than a hundred yards from my house.Despite the odd bluebottle it looked fairly fresh,
perhaps just a little bloated.The breeze
rippling its fur made me wonder as I approached from the back whether it was
still breathing.But I couldn’t think
where it had sprung from.I doubt that
there are any badger setts around here, though you can never be completely sure
as they are such elusive creatures.While
the housing is fairly low density, and the piece of grass on which the animal
lay is situated next to houses that are in an area called ‘The Coppice’ for a
good reason, there are no extensive woodlands where badgers would be able to
live undisturbed.On the other hand their
presence, otherwise secretive, might explain another mystery that has been
puzzling me recently: why I have seen so few slugs this year.

My immediate assumption was that it had been killed by a car but it is
unlikely, though possible, that it would have been thrown into that position,
and the body appeared relatively undamaged.
It looked like it had been placed there, but that would be an odd thing
to do with road kill, unless a mortified driver decided to treat it with more
respect than is usually accorded to cats and other small mammals knocked down
on the roads. Getting closer I noticed
an abrasion on the side of the head. It
was impossible for me to tell whether it was made pre- or post-mortem and whether
it was related to the cause of death. I
didn’t turn the body over to check the other side.

If not by a car, perhaps the badger had been killed by a marksman. Cambridge is well outside the cull area that
is currently operating in the west of England, but that doesn’t mean that they
are safe from assassination – remember David in The Archers illegally
shooting one unwise enough to wander too close to his cows when he had had
several TB reactors. It transpired at
the time that there were a few farmers taking the law into their own hands to
protect their herds, and it must still go on discreetly. The same day I saw the body, David Archer
was on air ranting about badgers again in what can only have been a show of
support for the National Farmers’ Union’s pro-culling stance. Even so, an illegal shooter would surely not
dump a corpse like that in such a visible place. Anyway, I don‘t think there are any dairy
farms close by, it’s arable in this area on the edge of Cambridge. Thus cause of death is a mystery, and one not
to be solved without an examination by a vet.

I think this is the first time I have ever seen one of these animals in
person, alive or dead. It was a sad
sight, and made concrete just what the fierce controversy that I have been
reading about in the news really means.
These are superb creatures, and their loss from the landscape, from
whatever cause, diminishes us all and degrades our environment. Whether or not culling badgers will prove to
be an effective way of stopping bovine TB in cattle I have no idea but critics
argue that there is more hope than science in the effort. Still, if the NFU figure of 38,000 cattle
slaughtered last year alone because of bovine TB is correct, I can understand
the desperation behind the act. Whether
the cull is successful or not, seeing the animal lying there, its fur rippling
in a warm September breeze, it seemed an emblem that we can be too quick to
prioritise our own interests over the other inhabitants of our world. It may have been shot, run over by a car, or
died of age or disease. Whatever its
fate, it made me think of how many badgers are being killed legally every night
at present, with such an uncertain outcome, to ensure that we have a ready
supply of dairy products on our tables.

Postscript

We rang the RSPCA when we got
home to tell them about the death, and they recorded our statement. They are taking reports of dead badgers
seriously because of the risk of illegal shooting. In fact, they are taking them so seriously
that an inspector came out to examine the body the following day, but by the
time he arrived the evidence had vanished, possibly removed by the Council as a
health hazard. Fortunately I was able to
show him my photographs and his verdict was that it was likely to have been hit
by a car. The hole in its neck was
certainly pre-mortem as the surrounding hair had fallen away because of
inflammation, and was probably caused by fighting with another badger.The distance it was lying from
the road could be explained by the species’ robustness. After a collision with a vehicle they often
go under the car rather than bounce off the radiator grill, and are able to get
up and walk some distance before collapsing.
As to whether there could be a badger clan in what I assumed was an
unpromising area, he thought it entirely possible. They tend to have a main sett with satellite
setts further away, and the latter do not need access to a wide range of food
resources to be viable. We could have
badgers fairly close and not realise it, perhaps living by a large lake which
isn’t far away, and is across the main road from where the body lay. So some answers, and while it is sad to think
that one of these magnificent creatures was the victim of a car, at least it
doesn’t look as if we have a rogue farmer deciding to extend the cull to this
neck of Impington.

Tuesday, 24 September 2013

In
an age when ghost hunting groups proliferate but their standards are often woefully
inadequate, solid and reliable information on how to carry out an investigation
properly is essential. In response to
that need, Leo Ruickbie has written a useful guide which will assist investigators
to conduct meaningful research. Subtitled
‘How to Identify and Investigate Spirits, Poltergeists, Hauntings and Other
Paranormal Activity’, its progression is logical, taking the reader through the
process of evaluation, equipment, investigation methods, analysis, and
interpretation of results. In addition
he discusses more general issues of psychical research, drawing heavily on the
files of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and the Ghost Club. Supplementing such historical material he
conducted two surveys, the ‘Ghost Hunting Survey’, interviewing investigators,
and a ‘Preliminary Survey of Hauntings’, the latter examining nearly a thousand
reports from across the UK.

Sections
look at ghosts in detail, categorising them in terms of factors such as degree
of visibility, whether or not they communicate or appear to have purpose, and
the sorts of places where they are said to be found, including a roundup of the
most famous locations (the SPR is often asked for its ‘Top 10”, but such lists
are more about marketing than psychical research). Methods used to obtain information are
covered, such as the Ouija board, mediums, dowsing, Electronic Voice Phenomena,
even necromancy (though you will need a bit more information than is provided
here if you fancy a go at that). Then
Ruickbie considers what might be going on, looking of course at the spirit
hypothesis, but covering other possibilities of varying degrees of plausibility. These include the environment, such as faulty
plumbing, underground water, carbon monoxide poisoning, infrasound, geo- and
electromagnetism, the ‘stone tape’ theory and more. Psychological factors are dealt with:
misperception, hallucination, the fantasy-prone personality etc. Possible causes of poltergeists are covered:
spirits, recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, a desire to be rehoused, even
stories put about as a cover for criminal activity.

After
this wide-ranging tour, the final chapter looks at the perils that can befall
the unwary investigator, from hit-and-runs, falling under trains, to being shot
(the last one more an American than a British problem these days, but
presumably a real danger for those groups foolhardy enough to commit trespass
in search of ghosts). Ruickbie found in
his Ghost Hunting Survey that over half of his respondents had been frightened
at least once during an investigation. As
he concludes, “ghost hunting is not for the faint-hearted.” At the very least it requires good social
skills, confidence when alone in the dark, and the ability to balance
open-mindedness with scepticism.
Completing the package, unlike many publications dealing with
spontaneous cases it has an excellent index and detailed endnotes which amply
demonstrate the extensive reading that informs the volume.

Unsurprisingly,
while it covers the full range of the aspects of investigation, the broad
coverage means that the book isn’t comprehensive, and readers wanting a
practical nuts-and-bolts technical guide taking them through the stages in further
detail should supplement it with information from other sources (my preference is
still Rosney et al’s A Beginner’s Guide to Paranormal Investigation,
published by Amberley). Ghost
Hunting is strong on the environmental factors that need to be taken into
account, and forceful on the distinction between assumption-led research, for
example that there is a haunting by a discarnate entity which only has to be
documented, as opposed to evidence-led research which tries to avoid prior
assumptions. Equipment is dealt with
lightly, and Ruickbie questions the appropriateness of much of the ghost
hunters’ typical gear as it is frequently misused and cannot provide the
evidence for paranormal activity that its users assume.

The
book certainly manages to cover a lot of ground and as Ruickbie acknowledges
the “Brief guide” in the title is something of a misnomer given that it is over
360 pages. Even so, the very breadth of coverage suggests that depth has had to
be sacrificed. That breadth though means
that there is something here for everybody who has an interest in spontaneous
case investigation, both the historical context and current best practice. One can quibble with the book’s title as many
researchers do not like the term ‘ghost hunting’, because it can be seen as
self-aggrandising, has aggressive connotations, and if consciousness does continue
is insulting to the dead. Unfortunately
publishers’ wishes often prevail over authors’ preferences in such matters.

Ruickbie
notes (and is not alone in so doing) the widespread influence that television
shows have had in shaping perceptions of ghost hunting and encouraging
substandard methodologies, making books such as this valuable as an antidote. Good information has to fight hard to hold
its own amongst the dross, a situation made difficult by its relative scarcity,
and he has helped to rectify that deficiency most ably. No doubt there will still be groups who think
that they know best with their gadgets, their obsession with orbs and even demons,
and their readiness to attribute every unusual occurrence they experience to
ghosts. But with such level-headed books
as this readily available, they will have even less excuse for their antics.

Sunday, 8 September 2013

It
comes as a surprise to discover that the author of this detective novel was
Christopher Caudwell (his mother’s surname), the Communist Party member who
wrote on cultural issues from a left-wing perspective, and who died fighting in
the Spanish Civil War in February 1937 at the age of 29.His was a strange, accelerated, career with
distinct segments encompassing prolific journalism, poetry and writing on
aeronautics in addition to the novels and Marxist polemic.The posthumous political works by Caudwell
are not much read now, the fiction even less so; the seven novels written under
his real name have faded from view to such an extent that an MA thesis dealing in
part with a couple of them referred to him as Caudwell throughout, as it was
better known.

Fatality in Fleet Street was published in
1933, before Sprigg joined the Communist Party.
It concerns a Fleet Street proprietor, Lord Carpenter, the “Governing
Director of Affiliated Publications, the biggest newspaper group in the
world”. Carpenter is anti-Soviet and seeks
to foment war with the USSR as the latter’s trade balance has become comparable
with England’s, making it an economic threat.
The policy is widely opposed among his staff and by the Prime
Minister. Carpenter also happens to be a
philandering bully, so that when he is found dead there are plenty of suspects
with a wide variety of motives. Beneath
the conventional detective story is a satire on the power of press barons to
manipulate public opinion, with even the PM helpless when faced by the ability
of the warmongering Carpenter to determine the country’s political actions. This manipulation is reinforced by
Carpenter’s virtual monopoly on news, assisted by the passing of laws
circumscribing the discussion of foreign policy on the wireless.

Although
the book was published in 1933, for some reason it is set in the future, in the
autumn of 1938 (p.2), November 1939 (p.155) or, if the date of Tuesday 12
October is accurate, 1937 (p.32).
Clearly Sprigg was not overly concerned with fine detail. Whichever date is correct, it leads to one or
two departures from history in our time-line, a world in which the Crystal
Palace (destroyed by fire in November 1936) is still standing, there is no
reference to the rise of Nazism and, if the events are taking place in late
1939, the Second World War hasn’t broken out.
Stalin has gone, replaced with “rulers gentler in political methods”,
and the USSR is a great manufacturer thanks to her Twelve-Year Plan (p.153),
which reads like science fiction. The
reference to Ukraine as a success story is particularly ironic because the
Holodomor took place during 1931-2 (about the time Sprigg was writing his novel),
Soviet mismanagement resulting in the deaths of millions through starvation.

The
characters are broadly drawn, and there is a suspicion that they have suffered
because of hasty writing. The main one,
Charles Venables, with monocle, is a journalist and crime expert on Carpenter’s
newspaper who delves into the mystery, which often means going head to head
with the police in the shape of the standard issue Inspector Manciple. Venables appears in four of Sprigg’s books,
of which Fatality in Fleet Street is
the second. He evokes Lord Peter Wimsey
and Albert Campion, both of whom were well established by 1933, and an
unreciprocated love interest (but which promises more) reminds one of Wimsey
and Harriet Vane.

A
group of Russian revolutionaries hiding out in the East End have apparently
dropped in from a discarded draft of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, odd considering Caudwell would so shortly embrace
radical politics. Their clichéd
attributes may have been the product of Sprigg’s false consciousness, soon to
undergo a far-reaching transformation, or they may represent a dislike of
clandestine political action compared to the mass agitation that he would later
undertake as a member of the CPGB in Poplar.
Middle class women are generally well-rounded compared to the menfolk, the
working class characters tend to be a bit ‘gor blimey’. The most amusing secondary character is a
highly intelligent Chinese journalist, Lee Kum Tong, whose depiction may have been
influence by Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan, with his pithy sayings designed
to subvert patronising Western notions of Chinese eternal wisdom. The plotting is reasonable, though the
identity of the murderer is not difficult to guess fairly early on. A large part is taken up by a trial, the
outcome of which is not in doubt, and it pads out the novel. There is a neat twist that is not too far
away from a scenario employed by Agatha Christie in Murder on the Orient Express, which appeared at the beginning of
1934.

Even
though superficially they seem very different, a certain continuity exists
between Fatality in Fleet Street and the
political works such as Illusion and
Reality and Studies in a Dying
Culture. The connection is the
crisis in bourgeois culture; its exploration from a liberal standpoint in the detective
novel is examined from a class-based perspective in the non-fiction. Patriotism is manufactured cynically by Lord
Carpenter to promote war for commercial advantage, parliamentary democracy is at
risk of subversion by special interests while the public is kept in the dark
and persuaded of courses of action on flimsy and exaggerated evidence. These are linkages with resonance even today.

Sprigg/Caudwell
would have been sorry to see the obscurity into which his cultural analyses
have sunk with the demise of the Communist Party as a political force and Marx
as an influential thinker, but it might have been some consolation to see his
novels rediscovered, and Christopher St John Sprigg come out from the shadow
cast by Christopher Caudwell. The range
and quantity of Sprigg’s writing shows that he had a formidable intellect, and
had he survived the Spanish Civil War who knows what he would have
achieved. One thing seems fairly clear,
however: with the principle of Socialist
Realism taking firm hold after the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress, Caudwell
would not have returned to such a bourgeois form as the detective novel even if
he had written more fiction.

It
would be good to see all of his books back in print, but sadly Fatality in Fleet Street has not been
issued as part of a Sprigg collection but as one of a series with the label
‘London Bound’, classic crime novels all set in the capital. Oleander have produced an attractive volume, and
even though Sprigg’s effort does not quite come up to the level of the best
detective fiction of the period, it is still recommended as an enjoyable read, by
one of the Golden Age’s most fascinating figures.

Monday, 2 September 2013

Reading
Brian Clegg’s book I felt there was some sleight of hand going on. He poses as a true sceptic rather than a
pseudo-sceptic, the latter being the sort that won’t look at the evidence
because it’s all nonsense, but it is obvious on which side of the fence he is
going to come down;the
reference to pseudoscience in the subtitle gives the game away. Yet because his stance is that of the
disinterested investigator willing to examine the issue from all sides,
stressing repeatedly that psychic abilities should not be dismissed out of
hand, his verdict is supposed to carry more weight than if he had adopted a
partisan standpoint from the outset.
Unfortunately, one of his major criticisms of parapsychologists is
cherry-picking, choosing the best results and discarding those not favourable
to their hypothesis, and he seems to have done some of that himself. The casual reader will obtain a very
selective view of the field from his book.

It
is important to stress that he is not addressing the entire field of psychical
research. As the subtitle suggests, he
is investigating alleged “powers of the mind”: telepathy, clairvoyance/remote
viewing, psychokinesis (which he consistently calls telekinesis for some reason,
though he does not advance any reason for adopting the older usage) and
precognition. Then he takes a close look
at the work of J. B. Rhine; the psychic cold war between the USA and USSR,
including the Stargate project (naturally referencing The Men Who Stare at Goats); the Princeton Engineering Anomalies
Research (PEAR) lab; and Uri Geller and spoon bending. Clegg does not address survival issues, though
he does mention cold reading, and the problem evaluating the Scole sittings because
of the spirits’ refusal to allow infrared during séances. There is nothing on apparitions or
poltergeists, the latter not even in terms of Recurrent Spontaneous
Psychokinesis – a living individual being the agent – as a possible cause (he
would doubtless argue that if there are problems influencing dice, psychokinesis
is not likely to work on heavier objects over longer distances). Even with this focus it is a lot of ground to
cover, and Clegg tends not to analyse any of the phenomena he examines in
depth.

The
root of the problem with the book is that Clegg does not have a parapsychology
background but is a popular science writer.
That means he has not immersed himself in the literature, and
selectively chooses what he needs to support a point; James Randi in particular
looms large as the model of a scientific investigator. Clegg’s references are embedded in the
endnotes, which helps to disguise the limited range of primary sources he has
consulted. While much of what he says is
pertinent and should be taken on board by researchers, you feel repeatedly that
you are only getting part of the story.
This may be for space reasons, but anyone who has a nodding acquaintance
with the literature will start to wonder if he is keen to skate over details that
might muddy his narrative. For example,
the chapter on PEAR relies on the project’s website and a 2005 article by
Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne in the Journal
of Scientific Exploration. There is no mention of their books Margins of Reality: The Role of
Consciousness in the Physical World (2009) and Consciousness and the Source of Reality: The PEAR Odyssey (2011),
which would seem to be essential to a reliable scrutiny of their work. Clegg’s dismissal would carry a lot more
weight if it had been based on deeper reading.

There
is a selective approach in other chapters too.
He makes great play of the telepathy experiments conducted by the early
Society for Psychical Research with George Albert Smith and Douglas Blackburn. (Incidentally
anyone looking for the SPR under ‘S’ in the index will be disappointed – as
sometimes happens with books published in the United States it is listed under
‘B’ as the ‘British Society for Psychical Research’, an organisation that does
not exist, presumably to distinguish it from the American Society for Psychical
Research, which does – just about.) Clegg
has taken his information on the Smith-Blackburn trials from C E M Hansel’s
sceptical 1966 book ESP: A Scientific
Evaluation without attribution, though he does cite Hansel’s book later
when discussing J. B Rhine’s laboratory.
The only reference Clegg provides to the Smith-Blackburn trials is an
article Blackburn wrote much later for the Daily
News, 1 September 1911, a reference to which is included in Hansel, though
it was only one of a number of articles Blackburn wrote for both the Daily News and previously for John Bull. The News
article is reprinted in the Journal of
the Society for Psychical Research – though there is no evidence that Clegg
has consulted the SPR’s literature because if he had he would have seen the
various responses it provoked, including from Smith himself – as well asin Paul
Kurtz’s A Skeptic’s Handbook of
Parapsychology. Clegg does not
indicate, and possibly does not appreciate, that Blackburn was an unreliable
witness with his own agenda. Further,
Clegg does not, as Hansel does not, address the SPR experiments in which Smith
was involved after Blackburn’s departure, reported in exhausting detail in its Proceedings. Clegg would probably have found this series
similarly flawed, but to reach a balanced conclusion on the early SPR’s
experiments they need to be taken into account.
Unless that is, Clegg merely wished to provide sufficient evidence to
support an opinion he had already reached.

There
is a chapter on Uri Geller that recounts the well-worn story of his
spoon-bending career. Just to rub in how
credulous investigators can be we have a section on the sad business of the
mini-Gellers investigated by John Taylor, as recounted in his book Superminds (1975), though not anything
about the book Taylor wrote after his change of heart, Science and the Supernatural (1980). But while we can nod sagely at the
ridiculousness of anybody believing that Geller bends spoon and forks using
anything other than a bit of manual dexterity, what about that 18mm chrome
vanadium combination Snap-On spanner that Geller is said to have bent at the Silverstone
Grand Prix in 1998? To do that required
somewhat more force than Geller would have been able to muster with thumb and
forefinger. Admittedly he could have
hidden a pre-bent spanner in his underpants and made a switch at an opportune
moment, or perhaps achieved the effect with the assistance of a confederate, on
the assumption that mechanics wouldn’t necessarily recognise every single
spanner they own. But this is of a
different order to manipulating table cutlery, and Clegg should have included
it in his account.

He
also polarises the issue of reliability into psi proponents vs sceptics, drawing
heavily on people like Randi, Hansel and Martin Gardner, though curiously not
Richard Wiseman or Chris French, as if they are the guardians of truth against
the gullibility of parapsychologists.
That parapsychologists have been gullible is not in doubt, as Clegg is
quick to note, but he fails to add that often accusations of fraud come from
within the field itself. In particular
he mentions Walter J Levy and Samuel Soal.
Levy was exposed not by a crusading sceptic but by fellow
researchers. Betty Markwick uncovered
cheating by Soal, yet Clegg does not mention that she is the longstanding Hon
Statistical Advisor of the SPR. And
Clegg’s source for his description of Markwick’s analysis of Soal’s data? Not her seminal paper ‘The Soal-Goldney
Experiments with Basil Shackleton: New Evidence of Data Manipulation’, in the
SPR’s Proceedings, but Randi’s Flim-Flam.

Extra Sensory is clearly
written, albeit with more on quantum physics than seems strictly necessary for the
discussion of possible mechanisms for telepathy. Clegg covers the principles of the scientific
approach, always worth hearing, and the dangers of relying on anecdotal
evidence. His verdict on the banality of
much of what passes for parapsychology is sadly true, though his final words
seem curious: “It’s time to switch off the life support for parapsychology in
its present form and get the researchers to bite the bullet and go for the real
thing.” It was news to me that
parapsychology was on life support at the present time and it will probably
come as a surprise to practising parapsychologists as well. He is right though to be wary of experiments
that produce only tiny statistical effects that could be attributed to normal
causes in both equipment and statistical analyses, because the results are so
often ambiguous and unrepresentative of how psi is supposed to work in the real
world. It is also a sad fact of the
field that promising avenues of research have a tendency to peter out, often
after becoming mired in controversy.

However,
while acknowledging that there are methodological problems in parapsychology,
it needs to be borne in mind that Clegg is not the open-minded sceptic that he
claims to be, and he draws on only a small part of the findings that have accumulated. Teasingly he keeps the possibility of
telepathy open, but rather damned by the grudging “There is some evidence that
has not been proved worthless” (“not yet anyway”, he might have added). The rest of it can, in his opinion, be
written off as tainted by issues of coincidence, poor experimental procedure,
statistical noise, misperception and selective memory, and of course
fraud. One wonders what grounds for
optimism he has for thinking that there might be something in it that is still
worth investigation.

Overview

Over the last few years I have written a large number of pieces, mainly reviews on aspects of the paranormal and of visual culture, but many are no longer available. This blog format is a convenient way of putting my bibliography online and adding some of the old items, plus the occasional new one.

A Note on Titles of Publications

The British and Irish Skeptic is now The Skeptic

The Newsletter of the Society for Psychical Research became The Psi Researcher and then The Paranormal Review

Many of the later items are available online, notably those written for nthposition and the SPR website. Those for The Psi Researcher, Paranormal Review and SPR Journal are available in the SPR's online library; see http://www.spr.ac.uk/ for details.